The Nature Journal

It’s fun to keep records of what you see. This will help you remember birds, and it’s fun to look back and see what you saw in the past. Describe birds you want to remember or sketch what you saw. Details are important; these can include:

Date, time, and weather

Relative size (bigger than a robin, smaller than a chickadee)

Field mark that led you to identify the bird

Habitat (e.g. backyard, pond, marsh)

What it was doing (e.g. feeding, flying back and forth from perch, bobbing its tail, chasing another bird out of its territory)

What it was feeding on

Male, female, pair, in a group?

Anything else in the environment of note

The journal should be your creation. Carry a notebook out in the field, journal in a diary at home, or create a blog. The important thing is taking time to reflect on what you have observed. Whenever you see something now, recording your experience in some way will make it much easier to remember what you learned.